Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History/Ananias Club

​Ananias Club.—According to an early letter head of the club, the St. Ananias club of Topeka was instituted July 4, 1876. It was organized in the year 1874, by a number of the “good fellows” of the capital city for social purposes, and was incorporated in 1886. The club had four tenets: Honesty, sobriety, chastity and veracity. The motto of the club was “Unadulterated truth.” St. Ananias was the patron saint. At the time of organization it had 29 members. Following are the original members and the official titles which they bore: Samuel A. Kingman, perpetual president; Sam Radges, secretary, phenomenal prevaricator; Floyd P. Baker, distinguished dissimulator; C. N. Beal, efficacious equivicator; A. Bergen, libelous linguist; J. C. Caldwell, eminent expander; George W. Crane, egregious exaggerator; Hiram P. Dillon, felicitous fabricator; Charles M. Foulkes, fearful fictionist; Norris L. Gage, quaint quibbler; N. S. Goss, oleaginous falsifier; Cyrus K. Holliday, illustrious illusionist; J. B. Johnson, truth torturer; Henry Keeler, laconic liar; John T. Morton, nimble narrator; D. A. Moulton, financial fabricator; Thomas A. Osborn, pungent punster; H. A. Pierce, diabolical dissembler; George R. Peck, sapient sophist; T. P. Rodgers, immaculate inventor; Byron Roberts, vivid variationist; H. K. Rowley, mephistophelian munchausenist; Dr. Silas E. Sheldon, esculapian equivicator; Henry Strong, racy romancer; William C. Webb, august amplifier; Daniel W. Wilder, hypothetical hyperbolisy; Archibald L. Williams, paraphrastic paralogist.

From the time of its organization until its dissolution the club had a membership of 82, which included many distinguished Kansans, of whom in the year 1911 not more than twelve or fifteen were living. It has been said that during the existence of the club its doors were never closed and that at almost any hour of the day or evening a whist game could be found in progress.

The club had but one president and one secretary, and after the death of President Kingman, on Sept. 9, 1904, the organization closed its doors, the records and portraits being turned over to the Kansas State Historical Society. Among the effects was an excellent, life-like portrait in oil, of St. Ananias, with halo over the head, a lyre clasped in his hands, his lips open as if about to sing, and the whole partially surrounded with a border of cherry sprigs showing the ruddy fruit, and each spray garnished with a small hatchet.